Product variants have become more and more common as companies grow. But they can be a pain to maintain, while still ensuring the integrity of your product line. In this blog, we are going to discuss what product variants are and how to add product variants in Shopify.

Well then, lets get started.

What is a Product Variant?

A product variant is a unique variant that is used to identify specific products. Some products share common attributes, but there are some attributes that differ; these are called variants. Each variant has its own unique identifier, such as price, and every variant is based on the same product definition. 

Product Variants are a part of a complete product content management strategy, Learn what is product content management?

What are Shopify Product Variants?

If your product comes in more than one option, you add variants for it such as size and color. Each combination of those options can be a different variant for that product, for e.g Small, Blue T-shirt, Medium, Blue T-shirt, or Large, Blue T-shirt. 

On Shopify, you can see a list of all variants on the product detail page and can manage the inventory for each of these from the Inventory page. 

Different Types of Product Variants: What Can They Do For You?

Barcode

By adding the barcode for each product with a different set of variants, you can increase conversion rates. 

Price

The public price for every variant is calculated based on the template price. If you wish to charge differently for a specific variation of your product, then you can compute that as an option for each variant. 

Inventory

Product variations are a great way to manage inventory. For example, if you’re selling t-shirts in your store, the product page will not show the total number of t-shirts in stock. Instead, it will show how much of each bundle variant is available. So if the user is checking out a pink t-shirt in size Small, it will show only how much of that specific type is available.

This is very beneficial as products with different variations have different demands and it helps to know how much of each variant is left in inventory. This way, you can prepare for inventory stock-ups. 

Media

Each variant will have its own primary media. For example, if you sell a shirt in 5 different colors, each color will have a different primary picture displayed on the product page. This may not be the case if the variation is the size of the product. 

Promotions

By adding promotions to your product for only some variants is a beneficial tool to market your products and bring attention to them. Adding promotions to lower-ranking variants is a great way to bring those products up, and market them.  

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Also read: E-commerce Product Images: Best Formats

Why Product Variants Are Helpful to E-commerce Stores 

Variants can create value for e-commerce entrepreneurs, and add benefit to their business. Here’s how: 

Increased Clicks

If a person is looking for something specific, such as a Blue Polo Shirt, they won’t land on your product unless you have used variants. By including the variant Colour: Blue in your catalog, it increases the likelihood of someone landing on your product during their search. 

Enhanced User Experience

Using a variant adds value to the user experience. Each type of variant has its own demand. A black t-shirt will most likely have a higher demand than a purple t-shirt. If you don’t customize the whole user experience on your online stores with variants, visitors will not be able to browse through variants and make a customized purchase.

Improving the Customer Experience

Product variations help improve the customer experience by making it easier for them to search through hundreds of products to find the products that they are looking for. It also allows them to compare different products that vary only slightly from one another.

So if you’re selling a product in 7 different colors and 4 different sizes, rather than having separate pages for all of them, your customer can access them all on one page. The customer won’t have to search through all listings for their color and size and they’ll be able to see the different variants available in their selected color and size on one product page. This provides a more organized and engaging shopping experience, as it requires less time and effort from the customer. 

Better Sales

Product variations also lead to increased sales because they give your products greater visibility. This happens because there may be certain colors or sizes of your products that don’t rank well, but variations of those products with greater visibility will help low-ranked products show on the same product pages. Also, by having all variants listed, customers might find something they didn’t know existed, and go through with buying that. 

By being part of a variation, all products benefit from one another. This means that product reviews and queries will be merged and bundled together, and lower-ranked products will benefit from other products that rank higher. For example, if your Black Tote bag has a higher ranking with more reviews, and your Blue Tote Bag has a lower ranking, all your reviews for the black bag will appear for the blue bag too. This can improve the conversion rate and SEO for the lower ranking bag, as it influences a customer’s decision and increases trust.  

How to Add Product Variants in Shopify

If you’re using Excel spreadsheets, it can be tedious to add multiple variants for each product. You must also ensure that your CSV file is in a format that is compatible with the platform that you’re using. Another way to add multiple variants is through a PIM such as Apimio. 

Solutions like Apimio let you add variants for each product once, and sync them to multiple e-commerce platforms. This way, you don’t have to add a new variant each time you upload new products. You can assign previous variants to new products. This is very efficient in instances where you’re selling similar products with similar variants. For example, if you sell apparel in limited sizes and colors, instead of creating a separate variant for each product, you can assign existing ones to your products. You can save time, and get your products to market faster. 

Become more efficient with PIM tools that automatically populate your variant fields. Learn about our product content tool.